


SAitB Timestamps

by HaroThar



Series: SAitB [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Depression, Guilt, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred, Self-Loathing, Survivor Guilt, Timestamp
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-20 01:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11325384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HaroThar/pseuds/HaroThar
Summary: This is gonna be where all my timestamps go!





	SAitB Timestamps

**Author's Note:**

> Don't let the relationship tag fool you. 
> 
> Anyway here have a timestamp literally no one asked for from the POV of a character I don't spend half as much time on as I should. I love Terezi with all my heart and soul. Here, read about her suffering.

GC: 1’V3 D3C1D3D TO GO B4CK 1NTO TH3 BUBBL3S/VO1D

GC: 1’M GO1NG TO GO LOOK FOR MY MO1R41L, 1 L34V3 TOMORROW MORN1NG

Your name is Terezi Pyrope, and you close snapchat before switching to your note app, which has the list Kanaya once sent you when you, she, Rose, and Jade went on a camping trip together. You’re not going camping, but you do need to know what necessities to bring.

Most of your clothing and your jetpack are in your sylladex already, given how prone you are to never staying at your own hive. A fangbrush, some hair ties that hopefully won’t snap or fly out of your hair within the first three nights, a snuggleplane and snuggleplush (or three (plus scalemates)) for when you stop flying around and sleep, a small but functional first aid kit (a courtesy of Jake, who insists that it is a must for all adventurers, and as the gods who beat the Game you are all exactly that), a lightstick and batteries in case you need to explore somewhere dark (which you doubt but hey it’s not like you don’t have spare captcha cards galore), lotion, about a million gallons of water, chalk, and all your weapon-canes go into your inventory as well. You also bring your phone charger, even though you know the Game keeps everything at 100% battery life just by merit of existing inside the confines of the Game anyway. Can’t hurt to be careful, you guess, even though there’s likely going to be nowhere to even plug in.

Then it’s a matter of food. You go back to the meteor for this. Somehow, that feels the most right. There’s still a shitload of provisions that your group didn’t eat leftover from when the carapacians used this place as a lab, chests upon chests (a number of which you don’t even need to pilfer, there are just that many) of stowed bland-but-nutritious food and a couple cases of seasoning that will be more than sufficient since they’re only feeding one person.

Maybe if you’d had sixteen people on the meteor ride instead of seven, this food would be gone. Maybe if you had done something different, had been less fucking _selfish_ , you could’ve fixed things instead of just shuffling them around enough that the Game considered it sufficient to win.

You remember the moment your Mind met other-timeline-you. In many ways, it was beautiful. _Powerful_. At the time it had filled you with something feverish, delighted. It still fills you with something feverish, but something located more in your gut. Twisting, twist _ed._ Your self-loathing feeds on it, that emotion, reminds you of your faults as a person.

_“Who are you to play god?”_ HA! You know what was going through your mind when you made that list for John, using his goodness, his ever-present gullibleness, his kind and empathetic heart against him. You weren’t trying to avoid the impediment of your friends’ free wills, you were clearing your own goddamn conscious, you were a terrified wriggler who didn’t want to get her fronds messy fixing other people’s mistakes just in case you accidentally made things worse and had more to blame yourself for, because you are a self-pitying, shallow, _coward._ So wrapped up in your own shame, your own self-hatred and pity, your own mistakes, that you refused to see the big picture, refused to do anything other than serve yourself and assuage your own fucking guilt.

You hated John, there at the end of the Game. Not because you felt caliginous- or at least only fleetingly if you truly did- but because he enabled you and you hated him for it. He couldn’t have known your greed. He couldn’t have known your selfishness, how the orders you gave him were for your benefit alone. He trusted you blindly, had no idea how disgusting your motives were, and you’d twisted up all the hate in your body and coiled it like a yarn ball that unspooled around him, the guileless idiot. Luckily even you’re not terrible enough for it to have been anything more than short-lived, but god you had hated him, hated him even more than you currently hate yourself.

You are sick and tired of yourself. You’re sick of your own cowardice. Sick of your dependency on your significant others to propel you forward. Sick of your selfishness, sick of your failures. What kind of legislacerator- no. What kind of _friend_ only fights for herself? Only works to prove _herself_ innocent? Did Feferi not deserve a second chance at life? Did Equius? Did Nepeta, or Eridan, or Tavros deserve their deaths? Why did you only bring Vriska back? Why did you abandon them?

You abandoned them because you’re selfish. You didn’t bring Vriska back because you love her- although you do. You brought her back because you were the one that killed her and you felt fucking _guilty._

Selfish, selfish, selfish.

So fuck your cowardice. Fuck your selfishness fuck your indecision fuck your self-centric worldview and fuck, most of all, your guilt. You’re going to fucking _do_ something about it. You will see all twelve of you reunited on Earth C with the humans and your planet full of offspring even if it takes a million sweeps, even if it fucking kills you. You don’t really like your life anyway, if you’re going to lose it you may as well lose it doing something more valuable than staring at a noose until your loudmouthed moirail (or cruel kismesis) comes and snaps you out of your thoughts.

You only realize that you’ve emptied all the contents of your (admittedly understocked) culinary block into the captcha cards alongside the provisions you gathered from the meteor when your hands start bleeding from where you grip the edges of a box of saran wrap. You pry your skin from the serrated line, then toss the thing in the trash. You lick the wounds, one in the meat of your palm below your thumb, one on the pad of your other thumb. In a different lifeline, the teal would’ve tasted sour, but right now it’s just. Your color.

A soft knock from the doorway of your culinary block alerts you to Davepeta, who you can now smell in all their multicolored glory.

“Oh, hey,” you greet, “Didn’t hear you come in.”

“Lost in thought?” they ask, and you hear them float closer, air in their feathers very apparent now that you’re listening for them.

“You could say that,” you say, and laugh. They don’t know that you were busy drowning in self-loathing. How funny.

Davepeta chuckles too, but it’s weak. “Hey, Terezi,” they say, and you sigh.

“I’m not going to be talked out of it,” you say, rolling the eyes you don’t really have. 

“... come sit down in the recreation block with me?” they say softly, gently, after a long moment of hesitation.

You don’t like where this is going. You follow them, still licking at your bleeding palm, and they sit on your multicushioned seating unit with you.

“So, mew know how I fucked off to go fight Lord English with the ghost army?” they start, and you just nod. “I- he killed a _lot_ of people, Terezi. His big ol’ gaping maw had a deadly soul-lazer and he kept shooting at a pawful lot of ghosts. A lot of our furriends died. I did purrity okay, I got a few claws in him befur he knocked me outta the ring, but uh, Vriskers…”

No. No no no no no no no. No, no no, _no_.

“She did great,” they tell you, and they’re trying to soften what they’re about to say next but _no_ they can’t, she couldn’t have, it’s not possible. “You should have seen her, a swarm of our furriends at her back, appurroaching with all the arrog- _confidence_ known to troll! She had this mega weapon, mew know, and she released it but-” no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no “-she released it behind her.”

No.

“I’m sorry, Terezi,”

No.

“but there’s no way,”

No.

“she could’ve pawsibly survived.”

No.

“When he let loose the Vast Honk she was right between him and the juju.”

No.

“I don’t think it matters how lucky someone is,”

No.

“no one survives that kind of attack.”

No.

“She’d vanished by the time the beam faded out,”

This can’t be real.

“I saw it myself, Terezi, with my own mew eyes.”

No!

“I’m sorry.”

You laugh. It catches Davepeta off-guard, you cackling about this like you might laugh at one of Jane’s pranks, or a particularly funny joke of Dave’s.

“Isn’t that just like her!” you crow. “Ahhh, fuck, her and her goddamned hubris. Why does she always do these things she fucking does?” you ask fondly, voice tinged with exasperation. 

You failed her. 

“Good lord, that girl.” You stand. “Well, I guess that means she’s gone, then.” 

You _failed_ her.

Davepeta stands as well, closing the distance between you to put a hand on your shoulder. “I know you really- ...really cared fur her,” they say, “I didn’t want to tell mew about watching her die- it seemed cruel. I thought- mew’d figure it out without needing to be told, I didn’t- I’m sorry, Terezi.”

You’re a failure of a moirail, a failure of a friend. You bent reality for one girl and one girl alone, and in the end even that didn’t matter. Half of you wants to reach up, place your palm on Davepeta’s hand, smear the teal of your scabbing wound over their skin and accept the comfort they’re ever so clearly trying to offer you.

But you’re not the kind of person who deserves it.

You shrug their hand off, a little stiff, and give them one of your widest grins. “I’m not broken up over it. She always did the dumbest shit just because she wanted to show off, you know?”

Davepeta nods, slowly, and you appreciate how easy it is to smell their movement when their colors keep changing as quickly as they do. 

“I’m-” you don’t know how to ask them to leave without seeming damaged or rude.

“Want me to leave mew alone for a little?” Davepeta asks, gentle enough it hurts you somewhere between your ribs, and you’re pathetically grateful.

“Yeah. I’ll see you around, Davepeta.”

Davepeta opens their mouth, a click of air escaping them, but they only nod and wave before flying away.

You don’t cry, but you’re certainly not numb. You selfish, greedy, parasitic _bastard,_ why is it that the only thing that mattered enough to you to change wasn’t something that mattered enough to you to protect? You’ve abandoned the friends you loved and now half of them are dead or double dead or missing!

You open your snapchat to- you’re not sure. You don’t want to not go, you’re all packed, and you had planned on looking for more people than just Vriska anyway, but who’s going to let you fly back into battle for people you haven’t seen in five years? People you’re not quadranted to, people you’ve no right…

GC: 1’M GO1NG TO GO LOOK FOR MY MO1R41L, 1 L34V3 TOMORROW MORN1NG

You miss Vriska. That much isn’t up for debate. You’re lost without her, cut adrift; sure she wasn’t the nicest person alive but she was your greatest source of happiness. You need her. But she wasn’t the only friend you were going to go looking for, dammit! You’re done with being selfish, remember? This isn’t about your happiness, this is about your _friends._ This isn’t about assuaging your ongoing guilt- you think you know better now than to ever think you can escape it’s vise- this is about doing right by them for the first time in your goddamned life.

You miss Feferi, you miss Equius, you miss Aradia, you miss Eridan ( _there’s someone else missing, someone your brain only knows the absence of. Like the marks of a pencil that has been erased, your mind can only recognize that something else was written, and now is there no more_ ). 

You miss _Sollux._

**gallowsCalibrator [GC] began trolling turntechCatnip [TC]**

GC: H3Y

GC: COULD YOU NOT T3LL 4NYON3 4BOUT WH4T YOU S41D TO M3?

GC: 3SP3C14LLY K4RK4T

You leave in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> So uh yeah I thought I was gonna work on my thesis but today my brain was like "Hey write about this" and I was like okay.


End file.
